‘Never forget,’ the world said of the Holocaust. But the world is forgetting
Long before the Holocaust had run its course, there was already a desperate urge to keep it from being forgotten. In hiding and on the run, amid the shadows of gas chambers and the smoke of crematoria, Jews frantically sought ways to bear witness to the enormities of the Nazis. Surrounded by horror, anticipating their own deaths, they appealed to the future: Remember.
In his Nobel Prize lecture in 1986, Elie Wiesel recalled the eminent historian Simon Dubnow, who over and over implored his fellow inhabitants in the Riga ghetto: “Yiddin, schreibt un farschreibt” — “Jews, write it all down.”
Many felt an overpowering need to preserve the truth. “Countless victims became chroniclers and historians in the ghettos, even in the death camps,” said Wiesel. “[They] left behind extraordinary documents. To testify became an obsession. They left us poems and letters, diaries and fragments of novels, some known throughout the world, others still unpublished.” And when the war was over and the mind-boggling scope of the Final Solution was fully grasped — the Germans and their collaborators had annihilated 6 million Jews from every corner of Europe, wiping out more than one-third of the world’s Jewish population — the moral imperative to remember grew even more intense.
Judaism has always attached intense significance to remembrance; in multiple passages the Hebrew Bible even makes it an explicit religious obligation. Not surprisingly, Israel’s parliament long ago added Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, to the Jewish calendar each spring. (It begins this year on Wednesday evening.) For many Holocaust survivors and their children, “Never Forget” understandably became almost an 11th Commandment.
But a commitment to remembrance spread far beyond the community of those most affected by the Nazis’ industrial-scale campaign to eradicate the Jews. In recent decades, Holocaust commemoration, particularly in the West, became a widespread cultural phenomenon. Countless books, lectures, and documentaries have been devoted to the topic. Academia is replete with Holocaust studies programs. On big and small screen alike, movies and miniseries on Holocaust themes have been runaway successes. Online resources for learning about the Holocaust are almost too numerous to count. And Holocaust memorials and museums have been erected in cities large and small, on every continent except Antarctica.
The Nazis’ extermination of European Jewry, an evil so unprecedented that the word “genocide” had to be coined to describe it, is among the most exhaustively researched, documented, and memorialized crimes of the 20th century. The powerful Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler, who in 1943 characterized the wholesale murder of the Jews, by then well underway, as “a glorious page in our history that . . . shall never be written,” was wrong. The history was written. Its remembrance is sustained by an ocean of scholarship, testimony, literature, and education. The last living survivors of the Holocaust are now mostly in their 80s or 90s. In a few years almost no one will be left to speak from personal experience of what it meant to be engulfed in the singular horror of the Shoah.
